SRT’s 2,590bhp Vision GT

SRT, Chrysler’s answer to Merc’s AMG department, has designed a racecar of the future. And it has been designed to break you into lots of little pieces. Please be upstanding – or hiding-behind-the-sofa-in-fear – for the SRT Tomahawk.

Commissioned as one of the excellent Vision GT cars exclusively for Gran Turismo 6 – to run alongside entries from Mercedes, BMW, Volkswagen and Chevrolet – the SRT Tomahawk has been designed with one aim: “to test the limits of human physiology”.

Oh sure, there are lofty aims about using current technologies, and predicting how they’ll pan out in 20 years time to aid performance. But mostly, SRT has created something that’ll probably just scare you (virtually) senseless. Of course, it’s not real, and exists only in the digital universe.

So, with a pinch of digital salt, here goes. The body has been designed to be as low as possible, with a ‘pinched waist’ silhouette, ‘curved, voluptuous surfacing’, NACA-style air intakes on the front and large air intakes to cool the carbon brakes.

There are also nine active aero panels and two front splitters, an exhaust system that works with the aero, and exposed aluminium channels to direct air that cool the engine.

Oh right, the engine. There are three, ahem, ‘trim levels’ available. The entry-level Tomahawk is the ‘S’ (the red one), which features a 7.0-litre, wide-angle V10 (a nod to the Dodge Viper, naturally) that kicks out 792bhp to the rear wheels, with a further 215bhp from the pneumatically driven front wheels. That makes 1,007 horses in total, a kerbweight of 918kg and a 250mph top speed.

The ‘GTS-R’ version (the one with the race livery) gets the same setup, but with power up to a total of 1,450bhp – 1,137bhp from the same V10, 313bhp from the front. This one weighs just 662kg and will top out at 300mph. Obviously.

Finally, you have the range-topping ‘X’ version; SRT’s very own Big Daddy Box Meal, Whopper and Big Mac all rolled into one. The V10 redlines at 14,500rpm and shoves 2,168bhp to the back, while another 422bhp of oomph from the pneumatically driven front wheels, to make 2,590bhp worth of whoopee.

Top speed? 404mph. SRT tell us if it were real, which it most definitely is not, you’d need a G-suit to protect your organs from imploding. A G-suit that gets compressed air stuffed in it whenever you hit the Tomahawk’s brakes, to ‘pressurise’ you. We think they may have misspelled ‘vaporise’.

The SRT sits on variable rate pneumatic springs with adjustable jounce and rebound damping, and it features an active camber system to lean the vehicle into turns. We’re told the game’s designers had to redesign the game’s physics metrics to fully incorporate it.